I can't believe they didn't think of adding completely unexplored planets (no outposts or mines). This game just feels like you're always late to a party you didn't even want to go to begin with. Single player games shouldn't feel like multiplayer games with no players.
It's extremely frustrating that a game like this tells you that it's up to you to go find these things on planets that no one has been to, only to get there and find out there's an outpost 100 metres away from the enormous, but never before investigated alien temple.
-fallout 3 will have 200 endings -skyrim will have infinite quests -fallout 76 16x times the details -starfield will have 1000 explorable planets todd hackward
I am a fan of Bethesda but when he started saying that shit I fucking know it gotta be some fucking bullshit. I just finished Starfield a couple of days ago, I am hoping once the Creation Kit is released, I am hoping the community is able to turn the tables. But then again, I don't like this because the next time Bethesda releases a game it repeats the same shit over and over.
I don't understand why people are saying this game is "expansive" when it has 5 major (aka handcrafted) settlements, four main quests, and a smattering of side jobs that are usually little more than fetch quests. Given the sheer amount of recycled code, you'd think they'd have put that development time into the writing but NOPE
I talked to someone who had barely leveled up in hundreds of hours and he explained that he was busy doing all of the hundreds of quests the game had to offer. I realized he thought the procedurally generated quests that combined W+X+Y=Z were part of the actual design of the game and not randomized tokens put together by the code to make a million fetch/kill/plant sensor quests at 50XP a pop. If that's what you consider enjoyable, then that's fair. But it's valid to acknowledge a game built around randomly giving you the same quests over and over for almost no reward isn't what most people signed up for.
I feel like they overdid it with the writing to be honest, it's such a slog I find myself skipping through all of it just to move along, every NPC is a huge exposition dump. The problem is it's just not interesting, the Rangers are the only faction I'm remotely interested in as you get to be a space cowboy, beyond that, even the Crimson Fleet operates like a boring business.
It's expansive when it comes to surface - not when it comes to good content. Quantity over quality is not an improvement. And this woke bs has no place in videogames, movies or politics.
I'm sure OP (@Synthonym) was refering to writing in the qualitative sense. Sure, there's a LOT of dialogue (quantity), but as you said, it's a lot of exposition dumping. All the quests seem like first drafts that got greenlighted and doubled-down on, without any reworking, tweaking, overhauls, etc. to make the world feel more cohesive and real. The procedural generation has a lot to do with this as well.
The game absolutely should hafe been like Mass Effect/Outer Worlds where there are set planets with maps you can visit instead of whatever the hell this is
@@watchlover7750yea man, i still wonder why they did that bc there’s no way bethesda is that tone deaf. there must’ve been a reason, like that generating 1000 planets still cost and was quicker to do than hand craft 100, even 20 planets, fully. that has to be reason, bc ain’t no way they thought this was genuinely the best idea atm
Outerworlds with Chorus spaceship combat and Destiny 2 Gunplay & Superpowers would've made this game amazing. But I'll never play a Bethesda Title again after 100% Redfall and 100% NG+10 Starfield. I proved the (ya gotta play more, it gets better) sentiments wrong. Still think Starfield is great? Get the Powers all leveled to X in the NG+10 lol bet you ya won't.
The biggest disappoint for me was exploration and the world building. It's just so dreadful the exploration is. I had sooo much fun just exploring in Fallout 4 going from point A to B. I made so many different stops along the way and picked up many quest because of that. Fallout rewards you for exploring, and you discover interesting things. In Starfield you fast travel from point A to B. No natural stops along the way. It's just boring in comparison. It's actually making me want to go replay Fallout 4 instead of hopping back into Starfield.
This game suffers from a lot of what I call "intelligence disconnects". For example, my overweight Industrialist character, Howard Huge, can become The Mantis in this game world. Howard can be then be recruited by SYSDEF to infiltrate the Crimson Fleet. What does Howard do? Steps onto The Key wearing the Mantis Armor, showing him to be an enemy of all pirates and criminals... And they don't don't even take notice. Good game design there, BGS!
NPC don't even notice when you point a gun in their face... or when you start shooting around them. Games 10-20 years ago had better immersion and NPC reaction (GTA III for example). Also, even in Oblivion (and Skyrim) named NPC had daily routines: go to work -> go to tavern ->go to sleep etc etc. while in SF most named NPC just stand in the same place 24/7 with 1 or 2 idle animations only. Downgraded Oblivion.
Fallout 4 is awful. Starfield is worse. Neither are worth appreciating. Don't be like a fool who eats rotting food, and then eats feces, and declares the rotten food delicious.
I was looking to buy starfield while i was browsing steam and i saw baldurs gate 3. I decided to give baldurs gate 3 a chance instead and i dont regret it. I can see myself buying starfield for 10-20 euros after modders have fixed it, if ever. I kept watching starfield videos if i should buy it and im happy you got recommended. Was very surprised your subscriber count isnt higher
Playing Baldur's Gate 3 and then following it up with Starfield has been like going from prime rib to McDonalds - it's so disappointing. Good enough for gamepass I guess.
@kaydens6964 I'm convinced the ones putting that kind of time into starfield are ones who's spent the last 10 years just playing skyrim or fallout and are fine with outdated stuff. I hvnt played it but ove watched a plethora of gameplay videos going over the story, side quest, exploration ect and ALL of it just seems like the game released 7-10 years ago and would have been only decent then as well.
@@kaydens6964 "Don't know how to play the game" is a funny way to put it. Especially since the game doesn't have any advanced controls and is just the generic Fallout in space. I mean I get you may like playing it, but that statement is just pure cope.
Bro you don't really get programming do you, do you have any idea how long time and how many people that would take? Then take into account that this is not an mmorpg this is single-player. And THEN take into account, the the system cannot eevn handle the current game as it is - you get that bigger and more detailed open worlds require a lot more power...right?
@@roserevancroix2308I agree that 12 is putting it out there but 3-6 would have been possible. You could have 1 main planet with a map of lets say 60% of skyrim. Then the other planets all have 30% of that map.
@@roserevancroix2308 I don't think anyone's asking them to make a *whole* planet for each, but a large and different enough map that each one feels like a unique place that is meant to feel like a real planet. Where the biomes and creatures all make sense. What Starfield is, is the same amount of content as Fallout 4 or Skyrim, with hours of randomised, homogenous garbage between them. You don't need to make a whole panet to make it feel like a new planet, Mass Effect has proven that, you just need to make each one unique and logical in it's construction. You could make a map a quarter of the size of skyrim and still make it feel like a whole new, expansive planet. A small, handcrafted area will always beat out a massive amount of mediocre RNG by it's mere nature. Like would you prefer 500 planets that all have the same 5 animals or 5 planets that have 15 unique to each planet and have specific ways to combat them? Say you go to the ice planet, and you face some creature that uses special, glowing glands that keep them warm, and they can also expel it as a caustic, burning bile, and you can significantly weaken their offensive capability by shooting out their glands, while simultaneous causing the thing to start slowly freezing, taking environmental damage until death. Or would you rather every animal is just a big bullet sponge that runs at you and melees until it's dead or you are?
@@____uncompetativeyou could still have it in the solar system with a destroyed world. It'd be alot more like cowboy bebop where each each planet and spacestation having their own culture. Even earth underground.
I thought I was going to encounter strange intelligent aliens civilizations or even humanoids still in their primitive era. There was none of this, but mostly empty planets or some with around 4 types of creatures.
Having 5-6 planetary systems with a max of 30 handcrafted planets with the ability to freely move with spaceships within a system would have made this game a truly masterpiece.
I didn't have a problem with procedural generation... because I barely ever explored it lol. Apart from anything in the main and faction quests, I completely avoided random planet surveys and shit. Boring as hell. But this had the ongoing effect of choking me with New Atlantis, Neon and Akila being the only places I messed around in. It wasn't a game to really interact the world with, it's just a game to finish the story and factions. After which, I'd be insane to just redo it all over again just to listen to all the endless exposition dumping.
On top of the repetitive nature of the procedural stuff, the fact that the universe is filled with millions of inexplicably violent people whom it's morally okay to kill (spacers, pirates, Ecliptic) creates a huge tonal problem for me. I meet Andreja and she's all "oh I'm sorry you had to see me stab a guy to death, I guess you're probably not used to that" when I and whichever member of Constellation I happen to have with me have been slaughtering dozens of people wherever we go. Plus, it feels like these groups are just very half-baked. Why are spacers just murdering anyone they come across? Why is Ecliptic, which is supposed to be a mercenary organization, shooting anyone they meet? Why can't I just hire them instead? The answer is because Bethesda needed people for the player to shoot at.
Generic enemy mercs, generic enemy pirates, generic enemy bandits/spacers... peak of Bethesda creativity 😀 Ridiculous how these generic enemies have more ships and troops than real factions. And of course the player has to kill them all... Perhaps it makes sense in Fallout where you roam nuclear wasteland, but no sense at all on "galactic scale".
I really really hope BGS has some BIG updates planned, bc for a game designed around multiple playthroughs and marketed as a game to be played for the next 10 years, I honestly don’t understand how they can expect anyone to play this for more than a few months tops.
Oblivion dungeons were not generated, but due to the restricted tilesets , universal grid snapping and the usage of preassembled rooms copied into the level, players could quickly identify most dungeons are not bespoke for the enemies or narrative they contain. All of the exterior of Oblivion however is mostly generated, featuring limited manual edits to fit in locations or similar content.
Remember: Skyrim in Space was the selling point. They literally just wanted to make the same game again, and use that as the main driver for people to purchase, and it worked.
Our industry is plagued by lecherously greedy, narcissistic, tumorous people who hold the power to games and we allowed them to be in those positions everytime we buy a microtransaction or pre-order. When will we learn.
One thing I was really hoping they would do lore wise was explain how all the planets have the same species of plants and animals. It could be something like despite many planets in the galaxy having goldy lox conditions, only one other planet in the galaxy sprouted life. After humanity abandoned earth, they began cultivating planets that could sustain life using the organisms found there. Maybe you could find that planet and depending on where you land, you'll find completely different plants and animals. Could also create an opportunity for interesting locations, like terraforming facilities and GMO labs. One side quest that kind of builds off that idea could be that a group essentially built a Noah's ark type ship when earth was being abandoned, went as far away from the settled systems as possible, and have been trying to live off the grid while sustaining old earth plants and animals. They may think something like if the rest of humanity found out, it would spark another war amongst the factions for control, resulting in the extinction of what life is left from old earth
6:40 The answer to that question has changed over the years, from a narrative/story/world building answer... to a spectacle/player-not-character answer. I think what happened is that the change to less narrative, more spectacle crashed headlong into the one thing procedural generation is good at: mass iteration. It became easy to see the patterns after a thousand iterations. It isn't like they couldn't write more world-building focused procedures that became more and more complex (imagine entire networks of cities an a planet, with conflicting factions and powers, all reacting to each other and ready for a player to waltz in and upset the status quo). But that would take the approach of "if you build it, they will come". Build an amazing sandbox world, and let the player create their own experience. Instead, the company has drifted towards spoonfed spectacles, and while some have noticed it in previous games, to an extent, the mass iteration of Starfield's design has helped peel back that curtain.
I think random generation can work, but Starfield did the absolute minium to qualify. The pool of potential "Points of interest" is very small, and when they do appear they are basically exactly the same. Enemies spawn in the same locations, loot is in the same spot etc. If you want random generation in games to be useful, it needs far more options to work with, and hopefully some over lap between them to make memorable moments. I always think of MInecraft. The sheer number of Seeds in that game is nuts. The way terrain is generated often blending between one and another is impressive, then you have resource placement like Ores, various Structures that not only spawn but can be affected by where they spawn. You have villages hanging off the edges of mountains, Mine shafts that are exposed due to a nearby ravine etc. Simply put Minecraft did it better years ago, and only has improved over the years.
Well, no one is going to make 1000s different animals, plants, buildings... especially not lazy Bethesda. The entire idea of "1000 planets" is dumb. Fallout and Skyrim at least try to hide flaws of both game engine and game design. But in SF both are exposed.
@@bdleo300 Honestly I think the biggest issue is Starfield tried to do too many different things, and did none of them well. if it really wanted to go all out on exploration and randomized planets it could. But it would need to have a random animal generator, dozens of arms, legs, bodies, attack types/elements etc. And have them put together per planet or something. Something similar for plants, terrain etc. But even if that did work, there was no reason to really explore. Base building was very weak, and the weight limit of what you can carry so insanely small gathering resources to build something impressive would be nuts. But yeah 5 or 6 well fleshed out planets would be better than thousands of randomly generated ones for the most part. Because random planet generation would need a reason to go explore, and nothing in Starfield really gives you one.
honestly i feel like procedural generation is being used as an easy scapegoat for people to ignore the larger issues with Starfield and Bethesda in general, procedural generation is a neutral thing to have in a game in can be used well or be used poorly and that's entirely up to the game designer having procedural generation is not a bad thing not doing anything with it is whats bad, Starfield biggest problem is not procedural generation its a pattern of misunderstanding or outright not caring about role playing game design that Bethesda has displayed since 2006, Daggerfall unity has recently become my fav game ever and its full of procedural generation so why isnt it a problem in that game? Because that game is actually a well made rpg with deep mechanics something Bethesda hasn't actually produced since Morrowind in 2002
Good point. I think the world building is just poor in Starfield. Space is a blank slate for the imagination to fill. And they fill it with lots of .. not much at all. It's 300 years in the future, yet other than spaceships, no amazing new tech. No magic - in both senses of the world. In Morrowind, I spent hours reading the lore in the books. Some of the writing was quality fantasy genere writing. Yet Starfield, the writing is so bland and dull, Chat GPT could do it with more life.
well, the beginning of the video kinda explain what bethesda did with oblivion to render the generation better... a true human was fine tuning the dungeon that were generated. in starfield, they decided to have some templates, and then copy paste the templates everywhere... problem is, they seems to have completely underdone the amount of template.
True but this game having some of the most boring and repetitive generation ever doesn't exactly help. Like they're not even cool to look at... You're right though. Procedural generation can be really cool. You just need to make sure there's interesting mechanics within the generation that interact with eachother or the player. It's not just a way to make really big maps....
One thing that really bothers me: it is more XP profitable to go to a place and randomly shoot fauna than scanning and studying stuff. I don’t like to kill random animals, with the exception of the terrormorphs. In the other hand, I love to scan stuff, a scientist/researcher build should be completely viable. Benefits for finding planet traits and cataloguing all species should be way more rewarding, like actually unlocking unique skills that affect the gameplay.
Even hive mind organisms grow and behave differently depending on the environment. Sometimes size is the obvious factor when one considers the level of a threat, sometimes it isn't in which case there is something about it that makes up for it, such as venom/poison, or even sheer numbers. Even Skyrim's creature placement makes some logical sense. This just looks like a Steam Greenlight shovelware game.
To be fair, I think you definitely could tune and tweak a procedural system to take all these things into account. Kind of be like, why even do it procedurally at that point though.
The same way you can develop a game to do literally anything you want, you just need time and resources. Procedural generation could generate a world similar to ours in complexity and detail, but, it would take an insurmountable amount of time and money to create a generation tool capable of that.
@@marcola4767dwarf fortress simulates atleast 42% of real human behavior when it generates a planet, man. Even hundreds of years of history that has context in those locations. Worth a check out. That guy did it for (basically) free because he loved his game.
I think the biggest letdown with Starfield is that I can't really explore a planet. I get to explore a very small square of terrain, about as big as a city. I can't explore the planet by just wandering around. This is something that should be changed. Even No Man's Sky has actual planets that you can move around on.
Im interested in how quickly modders improve the procedural generation. Without the CK in one month they have done some amazing things. Its just sad that the leadership of BGS is so...complacent. Add to that their inability to learn from criticism. "You just need to upgrade your computer" "You just need to not pick up every pencil holder and plate" besides every bug fix that modders have made for their games that then shows up in the next game, and the one after that. The best thing that could happen to BGS would be for all of the leadership positions to be replaced.
All Starfield does is scatter premade hand-crafted assets randomly around the map. I wouldn't even count it as a procgen. Even the most basic roguelike is expected to generate unique dungeons for you, but Bethesda even struggles to randomize the loot somehow.
I totally agree with you. There are many problems with Starfield, but I think the core issue with the game is the procedural generated areas instead of normal handcrafted maps. It feels empty and disconnected. And the fact that points of interest just spawn around you wherever you land, it makes it feel so artifical as you know they didn't exist until you landed, and there are not many of them so you end up seeing the same one's over and over.
What I didn't like about the exploration was that they never took advantage of the the other side of it. Yes, it can be beautiful and fascinating, seeing things that you've never seen before and marveling at the colors and phenomena around you. But remember: this is mostly uncharted territory. There should have been actually dangerous storms like lightning that shook the earth, comet storms, giant flaming geysers as the planet releases pressure, desert sands that are soft like oceans and can swallow you whole. Imagine they have a device that can scoop matter from a planet's orbital rings that is dangerously close to breaking down so you're trying to save the crew before the craft is consumed, hearing and feeling the thing slowly break down as the scoop starts losing power and gets trampled by high-speed matter crashing into it... Space can be amazing, but also terrifying. Part of why Constellation has its name should have been because, despite all that could happen, they dare to brave the unknown and find out WHY these things happen. That's what they advertise, but you never really get to take part in that. Such a shame.
Their strength wasn't making it feel "lived in" it was making areas with stuff to do. Relatively compact and interesting. It didn't have to make sense, which would be necessary if you actually wanted it to feel "lived in," it just had to be fun;
I dno, lot of the time you weren't doing anything though. Like most of the time you're not fighting or looting or something. Most of the time in Bethesda games is spent walking around. So it's important to have an interesting world to walk around in. Part of this is having enough npc's and quests to interact with but part of its also making sure the time in between is engaging. Having a believable immersive world helps a lot with that.
Honestly if the handmade part of the game would have been well made, I would have overlooked the shitty procedural generated part. But OH GOD!!! There are so many flaws that I wonna cry. I really wanted to love this, I loved many other GDR from Bethesda, but this is an eyesore
Most people don't fully understand procedural generation, in it's simplest form something like "Simplex Noise" is going to give you the same same output for the same input every time. So for example if you feed a 2 input noise algorithm 2 numbers it will give you the same output every time and if the next numbers you feed it are near the previous numbers than the next output will be very close to the previous output. so lets say you want to make a terrain mesh, you already have all the x,z coordinates all you need to do is generate the y coordinate an you have a height map. And those y coordinates will smoothly transition and create nice rolling terrain based on some other factors like amplitude and some other things. Also, the map will always be the same regardless of when you generate it. So you can "pre bake" your terrain. you can also use higher dimensional noise and make more abstract relationships to things like plant, animal and poi spawn locations. But the point is you are most likely pre baking the world and very little is being procedurally generated (maybe mineral locations) at runtime. Starflight 1987 Binary Systems/EA, it uses this same concept to create a galaxy to to explore (255 planets for 1987 using a programming language called 4th which was basically Assembly language with some extra math libs. So Starfield isn't really all that revolutionary since this tech was proven long long ago. So What I think would be interesting is the bulk of the universe gets procedurally generated but, you use AI to help vary the parameters. Then you can use generative ai to fill the universe with stuff and then have human writers and designers go in and hand curate sections of it. Anyway that's my 2 cents. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_noise en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight_2:_Trade_Routes_of_the_Cloud_Nebula www.gog.com/en/game/starflight_1_2
They made the game world bigger, but it ended up making exploration less satisfying. Instead of spending more time in the game as they expected, I actually spent less time in it. Out of all the BGS RPG games I've played, Starfield is ironically the one I got tired of the fastest.
The procedurally generated stuff is supposed to be grabbing from handcrafted content like bases and mining facilities. And there is some world building in them on slates or computers in the base. They say that after the war the two sides abandoned many bases and research facilities. So now the Spacers or Crimson Fleet can claim those areas and they have. However, the list of content to pull from isn't' enough. You end up getting the same facilities with the same background on many different planets. It also doesn't appear to retain the memory of what was generated in a specific area. I landed in one spot built an outpost and went out exploring. It was cool for bit I scanned everything which was a blast. Then I got stuck on the last Fauna. So I decided to return later. I landed close to same spot but not exactly the same spot and it reshuffled the content. I thought I was close enough to walk to my outpost but it's like you're on a treadmill. You are walking in a direction but not actually moving anywhere.
You will find books in certain areas, and not in others for a reson, in every other Bethesda game. In starfeild the robot even points it out at the beginning. A united facility all the way out hear. Now that doe sn't make sence at all lmfao.
If they had an index the size of an Encyclopedia 1000s of generated bits and examples random content, it would work a lot better. Having 10 or 20 gets played out quickly and they should’ve seen that coming.
Watch the gameplay trailer for star wars outlaws. Near the end when she lifts off the ship and breaks through the clouds. Thats how you hide a loading screen. loading screens arent the problem in starfield. Its how its handled. For example, when you dock a vessel, instead of being teleported into said vessel, you have to leave your seat, and walk to the door. Thats 2 loading screens back to back. They could fix all of this.
Starfield has nearly no Procedural Generation. the only Actual procedural Generation is Planet Layout and POI placement. Meaning POI's are not random, they will ALWAYS look the same, the only difference is Who occupies them.
Just because I am bored I will decide to explain how such an ecosystem COULD work, but I doubt Bethesda put into it: So the caterpillar is an ambush predator hiding in small burrows in tall patches of grass, it has a thick carapace so that it can tank many bulets with few necessary organs. It uses some form of sense when hiding in the ground to know when something is about to walk near it. It preps some form of venom and leaps out. Its venom immobilizes it and then all surrounding ones gather to eat the immobilized animal. At that moment one of the larger, faster animals takes advantage of the use of the sensor organ being used for finding the best chunck of meat. It runns through the patch, snaching 1-or if it's luck 2- worms. But it was just procideral genaration.
The best part of Starfield is seeing their defenders realize they were lied to, manipulated and stolen from. Their time, cash and trust were taken in exchange for Todd Howard's 2nd "top of the line Tesla".
At the end of the day, Skyrim a 12 year old game, will still be talked about and remembered for its story, gameplay, world, and polished mods for another 12 years. Meanwhile the only thing starfield has going for it is the eventual mods, and the die hard fans that will battle tooth and nail to label you a Sony pony if you say the games boring.. But even then those losers will soon forget about the game when the next AAA unfinished title releases.
It's not procedural generation at fault, it's too-simple procedural generation. The permissible variations are way too granular; the number of things which can vary at all is orders of magnitude too small. We don't need every rock, tree, and dungeon hand crafted, we just need so many of them we can't spot the repeats. Think about it for a moment: nature does weathering and growth according to a certain list of rules, but you don't hear complaints about Hall's Canyon looking exactly like The Grand Canyon but scaled down.
Bethesda games seem to have diminishing returns for me. It seems like each new release of theirs goes 3 steps back. They feel simpler and the rpg aspects are kind of there.
I'm a simple Canadian, I hear a YT'ber being Canadian, I sub. Joking a little, nice video, I love the game somehow even though I've also recently started No Mans Sky; Starfield really lacks the actual space exploration, but same time hopefully this reception from the public will encourage Bethesda to stick to hand-made content. I really hope in the future Starfield implements more features for Creation Engine like vehicles, like a Moon Buggy, so they can implement working vehicles in Fallout. Even though in the lore Levitation was almost a lost art by the time Oblivion's story occurs, I really hope they bring back Levitation magic for TES VI since they implemented Zero-G navigation, so its pretty much the same functionality, heck also include anti-gravity magic since they are able to have localized/isolated areas of gravity. (you can walk in your ship in space, upside down in relation to a planet, and be able to walk normally) But that's as big of hopes as hoping humanity will stop waging wars; they can do it, they have done it before, but it doesn't last long either cause they interpret it as a weakness or flaw, or they benefit without changing that status quo. Bethesda's issue has always been: they have an idea, possibly great idea, they implement the first iteration of that idea, then move on leaving it unfinished or incomplete.
That feeling of knowing you won't revisit a game for a long time is a shitty one. Finishing Starfield, I sat there and thought to myself "Did I just do ANYTHING that I am itching to do all over again?" and there wasn't. I have never felt that way before in a Bethesda game. And it's even more insane when you think about how this game comes with a built in NG+ system, but there is next to no reason to do so. This game is the embodiment of "Wide as an ocean deep as a puddle"
Yes, the entire game is a problem.☺ Take this crap along with Fallout 76, and use those resources to make a GOOD game instead, one that we actually want, like Elder Scrolls 6 (without all the toxic woke crap that ruins everything)
In their defence, I too don't really know how I'd tackle a space RPG in the Bethesda format. I mean, a singular zone like their older work would feel too small given the premise of space whilst multiple large zones would have them spread thin therefore resulting in a quality falloff. In theory, this model they chose (once the systems for generating terrain was completed) should allow them to save most of the development time and maintain a ton of focus on the handmade contend whilst the generated areas serves as nothing more than resource gain or repetitive radiant questing. Essentially this means they could make an environment equal to their previous games. But it isn't even like that, the hand built content still feels minute. The world system is counter productive to what Bethesda games do well. This new model of generated planets instead of one singular environment removes perhaps one of the strongest foundations in Bethesda games. The natural exploration and expansion of ones adventure. You could set off from point A to point B and have it explode exponentially into something far larger. This does not happen in starfield as you constantly fast travel to and from. The majority of environments are superficial and soulless - I have no motivation to explore any of those terrains outside of resource gathering which leaves me with the few hand built zones. This new new planet system model of there's does not fit their specialty in their take on the RPG genre. On one hand I do not think devs should be corned into making the same game for eternity but likewise they didn't make it clear enough that it'd venture this far away from their standard. I know allot claim that you'll like this game if you like the Bethesda formula but I disagree with this as I do not believe this is the typical Bethesda formula. It's the quests and that's just about it. It has stripped the players from creating their own fluid pathways and stories as they all venture off in different manners.
i quit after 30 hours, couldn't be arsed anymore, felt like wasting my time... now 2 minutes into the video and seeing the little oblivion snippet takes me right back to the very best days of my gaming historyfull of excitement, immersion, fun and gratefulness. wish i could relive it again.
14:08 I know I'm late as hell but I still wanted to share this. The Bear and Saber Cat should 100% be reversed. I barely remember fighting any bears in Skyrim, pretty much all of them were hiding away in caves far off the road, their aggression was so low they would attack once I'd had gotten way to close, and they would usually go down pretty easily to archery. The Saber Cats on the other hand may as well have been nightmare spawn from the depths of Oblivion. They always seemed to somehow teleport directly on top of me while I was exploring the wilderness and instantly shred my Dragonborn like they were an old sofa, while also taking almost no damage from any of my attacks. And they always seemed to show up most often when I low level.
The issue with procedural generation is its not new content, its rearranged content. If I have 5 quest templates that i generate 500 quests from, thats just the same 5 quests 100 times each. Players notice this. Generation can help keep things unpredictable (rooms being rearranged so you cant just memroize layouts for example) but it is limited by the amount of content still. Usually this means you need to focus quite heavily on creating content for generation, a good example is another bethesda game, Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall. The entire game is procedurally generated outside of the main quest and a few buildings, the entire development process was creating new stuff to push into their procedural generation algorithm. Starfield meanwhile had a split development, you have these high effort "islands of content" (as you put it) where everything is handcrafted then you have the open procedural areas. I think this is largely why starfields procedural content feels so bland, the procedural stuff really felt like a second-class-citizen when it came to content, it just doesnt have the variety or the freedom to generate interesting worlds because they didnt focus on this side of the game. You've seen all there is to see 3 hours in, everything is else is just narrative islands like the bases that appear with a special quest. There just isnt the breadth of content needed to make it compelling. Other games can get away with this because of the amount of interactions you have with the world (deforming terrain for example) but all we have here is an extremely late game building system Also as a nitpick I'd just like the mention procedural generation has nothing to do with AI.
to put it simply, more content and more rules on generation... more dev time, makes for a better procedural experience. You can't just slap a procedural generation demo into an existing game and expect it to improve the experience
I like the procedural design but at the same time I feel like certain things should have fixed on the planets..I ran into the problem where I may have landed on a planet then later got a mission to go find a temple there but the temple never spawned so I was never able to get the power. Certain outposts, structures, and caves should have been fixed locations on planets but allowing the procedural system work for landscaping and natural landmarks and the like. Kinda how like the cities, Neon, New Atlantis and such are fixed. This would have taken a little more development but would have allowed for the types of glitches where the temples wouldn’t spawn…a key part of the game and not being able to complete it. Plus adding in your build area for an outpost to not change and remain fixed once an outpost is installed. I’ve had many of my outposts glitches where I can use the work benches due to an obstruction, I build the tables next to a small platform that was in my outpost but when I went back the procedural function caused the platform to be gone a cluster of rocks were there enveloping my tables. Quite frustrating when you can’t use the functions of the game because they conflict with each other.
They should have cut the number of planets down to the necessary amount, And then added maybe an extra hundred planets. They could have easily taken 50-75 of those planets and given the planet a reason to exist, and then set parameters for the procedure to generate the layout and enemies based on a set list for that planet. And then the final planets they could have left completely empty, apart from maybe some ominous message or artifact left behind by an extinct civilization.
Procedural generation is great for padding. And when you look at most, maybe all, design decisions chosen for Starfield, they chose the one that pads the game time the most while requiring least effort.
Nothing to do with gameplay or the actual game itself, but I feel like the lack of interest for starfield for me and maybe a lot of people is that we "grew up". Oblivion, Skyrim, Fo3, FNV, they all made up my childhood. I spent countless hours immersing myself in these games back then because as a school student, there was plenty of spare time for gaming. With all the responsibilities as an adult now, the realization that "time is money", it's really hard to play large open world games like Starfield anymore. The fact that these explorable locations are procedural, just makes it feel as if the time sank exploring is pretty much meaningless with nothing really to look forward too. Adding more into that "lack of time to play" feeling.
And thanks to the procedial crap the game forgot to spawn in the Temple on a planet in the powers quest. So couldnt finish my hunt for all 24 powers on the first run.
I think it's pretty clear they had their priorities set wrongly in the very first place which resulted in this mess. This is going to be long, but let me state my opinion/point. If we look at the "ambient world-building" involving NPCs present in the game with actual handcrafted stuff, you can see that they seem to have invested effort on a different subject rather than the usual things you'd see them do on their other games to make places and encounters interesting instead. Keep in mind that I'm not talking about the objects/clutter on locations---which is said to have been designed by one of the most popular modders who made lived-in cluttered player homes in other BGS titles and ended up getting hired by them for this game. I'm talking about the things they specifically crafted with writing and other considerations you mentioned in this video, but involves NPCs in this case. This is going to involve the whole "agenda pushing" thing so bear with me here. First, the drama thing. The pronoun thing is certainly not that mentioned across the rest of the game, but I think it's being used to cloak the rest of the sheer volume of handcrafted ESG-DEI propaganda injected into the game so that people don't talk about it. For example: The Terrormorph quest decision and NPC reaction to the choice is inflexible because it's supposed to be subliminal messaging for _"Trust the Scoience!"_ It's meant to force the player into accepting and taking it at face value that only accepting the experimental drug/virus is _the right thing to do_ because the so-called *"Experts"* and everybody else around you tells you it is. This game is filled with a lot of that, basically, ESG-DEI stuff. If you haven't noticed/encountered them yet, majority of the ambient NPC _families_ (meaning parents with children) in this game that have unique mostly-world-building flavor dialogue suspiciously all seem to be of the _alphabet_ variety with two parents of the same sex. I would go so far as to say the only instances of scripted traditional "nuclear families" among NPCs in the environment that I've encountered actually end up being either single-parent households (the spouse is dead), or that one annoying encounter with the "smarter than adult" kid who almost gets taken away from his white parents and nearly gets given to some random adoptive parents by a black woman in a government position. There's also a multitude of ambient NPC romance encounters that play out in the same "alphabet people" subliminal messaging manner. Usually a biological guy after another biological guy. Or a transformer (as-in somebody who likes to transform their physical selves a lot) who has a romantic partner off-screen, who's entire purpose of existence in the game is to be implied to be constantly surgically changing their appearance in the character creation clinic, basically getting their friend interested in doing the same. Oh, and the whole thing with NPCs who are there just to scream the "We protest because we don't want to move on. We want to be angry! And we want xxxx group of people to be gone/removed!" theme. Because fiery but peaceful protests are acceptable it seems, instead of moving on and living in the present (dialogue-wise). If you look at the shops, all "service industry" shops end up having white soul-less sounding employees, while the self-employed shops are of the _racial minority_ contrary to that. There are encounters made just to show to you entitled behavior or "Karen" behaviors all of which seem to be centered around light-skinned NPCs. The bourgeois type of shops also often seem to end up being owned by less melanated NPCs. Or high-ranking positions across all industries in the game as well as an obvious percentage of the physical "vocations" being held by strong women, or if the higher position is a man they must always be supported by a woman NPC who is written to be more talented and capable than they are. This game is chock full of subliminal programming that it's blatant at this point IMO. And if you think about it, they spent all that time, effort, and money, just to put all of these handcrafted useless things into the game instead of actually focusing on better biome design, storytelling and questing. They spent time actually directing, choreographing, dubbing, sound testing, modeling, etc. all of these but could not bother to do so for the actual "biome exploration" part of the game. The priorities are wrong from the very beginning, hence we get this product. IMAGINE if TES6 comes out and it's filled with the same stuffed direction. Welcome to Tamriel California! I guess... And I won't be buying it if so as it feels soulless and empty. 😫
FO4's Atmosphere, the feeling of solitude, the feeling of desolation is streaks ahead of starfield. Initially in Starfield I experienced atmosphere in the abandoned mines/outposts, but the endless repetition of copy paste buildings and NPC's vanished that sentiment quickly, its now a massive boring chore doing these missions in order to build xp.
I think the main reason Starfields earth doesn't have large ruins or buildings is that it would make the game slog or crash. As I noticed that in fallout 4 downtown Boston can cause your game to crash most commonly in heavily populated areas.
It's one thing to use ai to procedurally generate interesting landscapes. You could then use those landscapes and modify them to save some development time. The problem is when devs try to make every experience unique. That only works for a game centered on player creativity and crafting. It doesn't work for other games. I still have no idea why ANYONE plays roguelike games.
Isn't the reason so many people love Bethesda because of the massive handcrafted worlds you can walk around in freely? Clearly the logical thing to do is create a new game with 90% procedural generation and fast travel is also required because Bethesda isn't even *close* to having the tech needed to make a good space game
funny how you mention Rimworld in the end, a large chunk of the beauty of that game is from the absolutely dizzying number of interacting mechanisms within the unassuming 2D graphical presentation. Starfield - at least from what I've seen come across my feed here - has little to no "under the hood" work done to make the setting *Feel* alive. if anything, I think the brunt of script work is just for the Engine's procedural generation, which can't really work with Creation itself without making a rather butt-clenching number of compromises with the Cell Loading limitations it has.
I disagree that procedural generation itself was the problem, I think it can be used to great effect. I do agree what was done in Starfield was not great, the biggest problem was they played it way too safe. They should have mixed set planets with procedural and gone much, much bigger in ideas. Dead planets, hazardous planets, caves with ultra rare minerals, swarms of aliens, more unique stories told instead of an 'abandoned' whatever
So I landed on this barren planet after receiving and following a distress beacon i exited my craft ... and then I walked and I walked and I walked. After a wide expanse of nothing much, I hit an invisible force field. I smacked my face on the inside of my visor and my nose bled. I suddenly heard laughter. Uncontrollable laughter! I turned, to see an OLD man, laughing from his belly! He laughed so hard that he died and fell to the floor. I found a diary which explained that this old man arrived on the planet 76 years ago and on discovering the forcefield, his mischievous nature couldn't resist throwing a distress beacon just outside the forcefield. He sat back and waited. For 58 years. With an infinite supply of everlasting sandwiches, all of them with only one bite taken from them. He waited and waited for the hilarious moment of my arrival and the smashing of my face into the forcefield. At this moment, his life was complete and he left this Universe with a smile on his face. I felt glad that I had fulfilled this person's dream. As I turned around to walk back to the ship, Sarah Morgan explained thay she was very, very, VERY disappointed in me for contributing towards his death. I shrugged and carried on with my quest to bring some liver pate to a lady in a clinic reception. (only some of this story is true... shortly afterwards, I shut down starfield for good because I kept falling asleep in my chair, which makes my neck sore). Thanks for this video, which exactly explains why Starfield is so dull in many aspects of its gameplay.
When I first heard about starfield, I got so excited. Then I found out you can't land your ship, or fly it in atmosphere. You can't fly around the solar systems, or go from orbit to ground seamlessly, like elite dangerous. but that was ok, this isn't s space sim, it's a space RPG. I'm willing to give up all of that in exchange for the highly detailed, curated planets we'll be getting! Imagine, dozens of mini skyrims! Each world giving you a "world" of content! Then I actually played the game and found out there's only a small handful of cities, and they're all very teeny and EVERYTHING else is randomly generated. Once I found the same exact alien for the third time (in the same system no less) exploration felt like a waste of time. But the best part of bethesda games is... the mods. It'll take a year or two, but we might still get what the game could've been. We'll just have to wait for modders to do it.
I haven't played Starfield, yet, but its overreliance on procedurally generated content reminds me a bit of Daggerfall. Except for a handful of dungeons tied to the main quest, all of the (literal thousands) of dungeons in that game are procedurally generated. And hooboy does it show. There's a reason why Daggerfall Unity has console commands to teleport you to a quest target.
There's a difference between using procedural generation as part of development, which is then customised by the devs, and using it in-game on the fly. Using it in-game means there can't be a cohesive continuous world because each bit of the world is created separately with no connection to any other bit. It should never have been used the way it has been, but the reason it was is obvious: it allowed Bethesda to have 1000 planets as the headline selling point.
Exactly, procedural generation needs to have a fun reason for being implemented. Having a lot of variation in maps makes me excited when I think of something like “Binding of Isaac” because it gives a different experience and difficulty each time. In a game like Starfield, when they are offering whole new planets, the amount of options they need to build in for the generation are insane. Instead they just put in barely over the minimum needed for something so huge, then try and say that there are thousands of different planets to explore. Yea technically there are…but in such huge game, they feel strangely small and boring. Edit: Also fuck the whole bullet sponge thing, it’s a really unsatisfying part of the game.
I have no problem with procedural generation, I have a problem with the huge empty game universe. They should have kept it local to 1 solar system or a single planet.
There are a few massively immersion-breaking things in Starfield. (and yet, I still enjoy the game). The things that bug me the most are that every planet with anomalies and Temples also has man-made structures. Most often occupied by spacers, pirates, or Ecliptic. And yet, the only people who know about artifacts & temples are Constellation & Starborn. Really? It should based on the surroundings - old news. While I enjoy surveying planets, I have to ignore the fact that 100's if not thousands of people were there before me - did no one already do a complete survey? Constellation tells me that they are the only Explorers left - well, yeah, we've put stuff on every inhabitable and uninhabitable planet in the Galaxy, and people don't consider scavenging to be "Exploration." - It's annoying, so I try to ignore it, and generally I do.
Also some of the mis use was not tuning it properly, like giving lists of certain biome creatures, and predator prey hierarcies. Not saying you're wrong, but they could of had a better base to work off of if they had tuned things. Also if there was a way for them to tally what you as a player experienced already so it wouldn't generate duplicate storied content would have helped too.
It's so frustrating AAA studios don't take advantage of procedural generation to make maps larger than we've seen before with then a significant hand touch afterward. No need to go straight to planet size. A game map the actual size of the u.s for example would be wild. AAA studios are the ones that have the man power to genuinely do multiple large cities, and several dozen medium and small settlements.
I can't believe they didn't think of adding completely unexplored planets (no outposts or mines). This game just feels like you're always late to a party you didn't even want to go to begin with.
Single player games shouldn't feel like multiplayer games with no players.
I've found 1-2 completely unexplored planets. They were empty and procedurally generated, and utterly boring but they were there. :/
It's extremely frustrating that a game like this tells you that it's up to you to go find these things on planets that no one has been to, only to get there and find out there's an outpost 100 metres away from the enormous, but never before investigated alien temple.
They are there on the edges of the map, but they are completely uninteresting since there's nothing to explore there...
Bolivar I is an uninhabited planet I found that has a really pretty tropical forest biome. That's where I set up my main base.
there's entire unexplored systems bro
When he said 1000 planets you knew it would be trash
Fr
You could cut the entire right half of the systems and almost nothing of value would have been lost.
-fallout 3 will have 200 endings
-skyrim will have infinite quests
-fallout 76 16x times the details
-starfield will have 1000 explorable planets
todd hackward
I am a fan of Bethesda but when he started saying that shit I fucking know it gotta be some fucking bullshit. I just finished Starfield a couple of days ago, I am hoping once the Creation Kit is released, I am hoping the community is able to turn the tables. But then again, I don't like this because the next time Bethesda releases a game it repeats the same shit over and over.
Said it from day one
I don't understand why people are saying this game is "expansive" when it has 5 major (aka handcrafted) settlements, four main quests, and a smattering of side jobs that are usually little more than fetch quests. Given the sheer amount of recycled code, you'd think they'd have put that development time into the writing but NOPE
I talked to someone who had barely leveled up in hundreds of hours and he explained that he was busy doing all of the hundreds of quests the game had to offer. I realized he thought the procedurally generated quests that combined W+X+Y=Z were part of the actual design of the game and not randomized tokens put together by the code to make a million fetch/kill/plant sensor quests at 50XP a pop.
If that's what you consider enjoyable, then that's fair. But it's valid to acknowledge a game built around randomly giving you the same quests over and over for almost no reward isn't what most people signed up for.
I feel like they overdid it with the writing to be honest, it's such a slog I find myself skipping through all of it just to move along, every NPC is a huge exposition dump. The problem is it's just not interesting, the Rangers are the only faction I'm remotely interested in as you get to be a space cowboy, beyond that, even the Crimson Fleet operates like a boring business.
It's expansive when it comes to surface - not when it comes to good content.
Quantity over quality is not an improvement. And this woke bs has no place in videogames, movies or politics.
I'm sure OP (@Synthonym) was refering to writing in the qualitative sense. Sure, there's a LOT of dialogue (quantity), but as you said, it's a lot of exposition dumping. All the quests seem like first drafts that got greenlighted and doubled-down on, without any reworking, tweaking, overhauls, etc. to make the world feel more cohesive and real. The procedural generation has a lot to do with this as well.
A 1000 planets to explore!!! XD
The game absolutely should hafe been like Mass Effect/Outer Worlds where there are set planets with maps you can visit instead of whatever the hell this is
Thing is, it’s closer to what BioWare wanted Mass Effect Andromeda to be like.
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos and that game is trash
Oooor they could have made some handcrafted inhabitated planets and the rest procedurally generated only for resource gathering
@@watchlover7750yea man, i still wonder why they did that bc there’s no way bethesda is that tone deaf. there must’ve been a reason, like that generating 1000 planets still cost and was quicker to do than hand craft 100, even 20 planets, fully. that has to be reason, bc ain’t no way they thought this was genuinely the best idea atm
Outerworlds with Chorus spaceship combat and Destiny 2 Gunplay & Superpowers would've made this game amazing.
But I'll never play a Bethesda Title again after 100% Redfall and 100% NG+10 Starfield. I proved the (ya gotta play more, it gets better) sentiments wrong.
Still think Starfield is great? Get the Powers all leveled to X in the NG+10 lol bet you ya won't.
The biggest disappoint for me was exploration and the world building. It's just so dreadful the exploration is. I had sooo much fun just exploring in Fallout 4 going from point A to B. I made so many different stops along the way and picked up many quest because of that. Fallout rewards you for exploring, and you discover interesting things. In Starfield you fast travel from point A to B. No natural stops along the way. It's just boring in comparison. It's actually making me want to go replay Fallout 4 instead of hopping back into Starfield.
Its funny, the one thing Starfield excelled at was getting me to appreciate Skyrim exploration.
Same. After about 30 hours in Starfield, I started Fallout: New Vegas again.
That, and it's just barely a roleplaying game. I'd probably be able to overlook the terrible exploration if the roleplay was good.
@@Pellingtonsevery game Bethesda launches makes me like their previous games more in retrospect.
It's like reverse nostalgia or something XD
This game suffers from a lot of what I call "intelligence disconnects". For example, my overweight Industrialist character, Howard Huge, can become The Mantis in this game world. Howard can be then be recruited by SYSDEF to infiltrate the Crimson Fleet. What does Howard do? Steps onto The Key wearing the Mantis Armor, showing him to be an enemy of all pirates and criminals... And they don't don't even take notice. Good game design there, BGS!
What you're describing is known as ludonarrative dissonance, where the actions of the player contradict the text of the story/setting.
There's no such thing as intelligence in this game.
@@roserevancroix2308the first two comments saying the same thing lmao
NPC don't even notice when you point a gun in their face... or when you start shooting around them. Games 10-20 years ago had better immersion and NPC reaction (GTA III for example).
Also, even in Oblivion (and Skyrim) named NPC had daily routines: go to work -> go to tavern ->go to sleep etc etc. while in SF most named NPC just stand in the same place 24/7 with 1 or 2 idle animations only. Downgraded Oblivion.
@@bdleo300 where did all that time and money go I wonder
Starfield makes me appreciate Fallout 4 way more
Fallout 4 is awful. Starfield is worse. Neither are worth appreciating.
Don't be like a fool who eats rotting food, and then eats feces, and declares the rotten food delicious.
@@Insomnolant1335 ok
I was looking to buy starfield while i was browsing steam and i saw baldurs gate 3. I decided to give baldurs gate 3 a chance instead and i dont regret it. I can see myself buying starfield for 10-20 euros after modders have fixed it, if ever. I kept watching starfield videos if i should buy it and im happy you got recommended. Was very surprised your subscriber count isnt higher
You made the right call Baldur's Gate 3 is sooooo good!
Playing Baldur's Gate 3 and then following it up with Starfield has been like going from prime rib to McDonalds - it's so disappointing. Good enough for gamepass I guess.
@@2HeadedHeroI played bg3 for 60 hrs and followed by 170 hrs of starfield, people just don’t know how to play the game and jump on the hate train 😂
@kaydens6964 I'm convinced the ones putting that kind of time into starfield are ones who's spent the last 10 years just playing skyrim or fallout and are fine with outdated stuff. I hvnt played it but ove watched a plethora of gameplay videos going over the story, side quest, exploration ect and ALL of it just seems like the game released 7-10 years ago and would have been only decent then as well.
@@kaydens6964 "Don't know how to play the game" is a funny way to put it.
Especially since the game doesn't have any advanced controls and is just the generic Fallout in space.
I mean I get you may like playing it, but that statement is just pure cope.
They should’ve made 12 handcrafted planets in a single solar system that you can fly across yourself
Bro you don't really get programming do you, do you have any idea how long time and how many people that would take?
Then take into account that this is not an mmorpg this is single-player. And THEN take into account, the the system cannot eevn handle the current game as it is - you get that bigger and more detailed open worlds require a lot more power...right?
@@roserevancroix2308I agree that 12 is putting it out there but 3-6 would have been possible. You could have 1 main planet with a map of lets say 60% of skyrim. Then the other planets all have 30% of that map.
Technically, you mean "in a star system". As to set it "in a solar system" would require you to include Earth as that planet is in the Sol system.
@@roserevancroix2308 I don't think anyone's asking them to make a *whole* planet for each, but a large and different enough map that each one feels like a unique place that is meant to feel like a real planet. Where the biomes and creatures all make sense. What Starfield is, is the same amount of content as Fallout 4 or Skyrim, with hours of randomised, homogenous garbage between them. You don't need to make a whole panet to make it feel like a new planet, Mass Effect has proven that, you just need to make each one unique and logical in it's construction. You could make a map a quarter of the size of skyrim and still make it feel like a whole new, expansive planet. A small, handcrafted area will always beat out a massive amount of mediocre RNG by it's mere nature.
Like would you prefer 500 planets that all have the same 5 animals or 5 planets that have 15 unique to each planet and have specific ways to combat them? Say you go to the ice planet, and you face some creature that uses special, glowing glands that keep them warm, and they can also expel it as a caustic, burning bile, and you can significantly weaken their offensive capability by shooting out their glands, while simultaneous causing the thing to start slowly freezing, taking environmental damage until death. Or would you rather every animal is just a big bullet sponge that runs at you and melees until it's dead or you are?
@@____uncompetativeyou could still have it in the solar system with a destroyed world. It'd be alot more like cowboy bebop where each each planet and spacestation having their own culture. Even earth underground.
Shout out to Deep Rock Galactic for utilizing procedural generation as a cornerstone and it never feeling stale or redundant.
I thought I was going to encounter strange intelligent aliens civilizations or even humanoids still in their primitive era. There was none of this, but mostly empty planets or some with around 4 types of creatures.
Having 5-6 planetary systems with a max of 30 handcrafted planets with the ability to freely move with spaceships within a system would have made this game a truly masterpiece.
Having a brain function beyond a vegetable ruins STARFIELD
Skyrim had somehow more hand build villages and city than starfield on 1000 planets….
I didn't have a problem with procedural generation... because I barely ever explored it lol.
Apart from anything in the main and faction quests, I completely avoided random planet surveys and shit. Boring as hell. But this had the ongoing effect of choking me with New Atlantis, Neon and Akila being the only places I messed around in.
It wasn't a game to really interact the world with, it's just a game to finish the story and factions. After which, I'd be insane to just redo it all over again just to listen to all the endless exposition dumping.
On top of the repetitive nature of the procedural stuff, the fact that the universe is filled with millions of inexplicably violent people whom it's morally okay to kill (spacers, pirates, Ecliptic) creates a huge tonal problem for me. I meet Andreja and she's all "oh I'm sorry you had to see me stab a guy to death, I guess you're probably not used to that" when I and whichever member of Constellation I happen to have with me have been slaughtering dozens of people wherever we go. Plus, it feels like these groups are just very half-baked. Why are spacers just murdering anyone they come across? Why is Ecliptic, which is supposed to be a mercenary organization, shooting anyone they meet? Why can't I just hire them instead? The answer is because Bethesda needed people for the player to shoot at.
Bethesda doesn't seem to understand the concept of a "mercenary". The Gunners in FO4 had this same issue.
@@userequaltoNullFallout 3 had the same thing
Generic enemy mercs, generic enemy pirates, generic enemy bandits/spacers... peak of Bethesda creativity 😀
Ridiculous how these generic enemies have more ships and troops than real factions. And of course the player has to kill them all...
Perhaps it makes sense in Fallout where you roam nuclear wasteland, but no sense at all on "galactic scale".
I really really hope BGS has some BIG updates planned, bc for a game designed around multiple playthroughs and marketed as a game to be played for the next 10 years, I honestly don’t understand how they can expect anyone to play this for more than a few months tops.
Procedural generation is the least of Starfields problems
Beth dev: man prople really hate procedurally generated quests
Todd: but, what if all of it?
Todd: make it cheap. Sell it expensive. It just works!
Oblivion dungeons were not generated, but due to the restricted tilesets , universal grid snapping and the usage of preassembled rooms copied into the level, players could quickly identify most dungeons are not bespoke for the enemies or narrative they contain. All of the exterior of Oblivion however is mostly generated, featuring limited manual edits to fit in locations or similar content.
Oblivion planes were generated, and SF 'planets' are just reskinned Oblivion planes.
Remember: Skyrim in Space was the selling point. They literally just wanted to make the same game again, and use that as the main driver for people to purchase, and it worked.
7:27 You are SO wrong. Fallout 4's world is utterly moronic. People living among skeletons in windowless ruins 200 years after the bombs fell
Our industry is plagued by lecherously greedy, narcissistic, tumorous people who hold the power to games and we allowed them to be in those positions everytime we buy a microtransaction or pre-order. When will we learn.
Exactly100
It just works
One thing I was really hoping they would do lore wise was explain how all the planets have the same species of plants and animals. It could be something like despite many planets in the galaxy having goldy lox conditions, only one other planet in the galaxy sprouted life. After humanity abandoned earth, they began cultivating planets that could sustain life using the organisms found there. Maybe you could find that planet and depending on where you land, you'll find completely different plants and animals. Could also create an opportunity for interesting locations, like terraforming facilities and GMO labs.
One side quest that kind of builds off that idea could be that a group essentially built a Noah's ark type ship when earth was being abandoned, went as far away from the settled systems as possible, and have been trying to live off the grid while sustaining old earth plants and animals. They may think something like if the rest of humanity found out, it would spark another war amongst the factions for control, resulting in the extinction of what life is left from old earth
You just wrote a better plot than their entire team of writers
6:40
The answer to that question has changed over the years, from a narrative/story/world building answer... to a spectacle/player-not-character answer.
I think what happened is that the change to less narrative, more spectacle crashed headlong into the one thing procedural generation is good at: mass iteration.
It became easy to see the patterns after a thousand iterations.
It isn't like they couldn't write more world-building focused procedures that became more and more complex (imagine entire networks of cities an a planet, with conflicting factions and powers, all reacting to each other and ready for a player to waltz in and upset the status quo).
But that would take the approach of "if you build it, they will come". Build an amazing sandbox world, and let the player create their own experience.
Instead, the company has drifted towards spoonfed spectacles, and while some have noticed it in previous games, to an extent, the mass iteration of Starfield's design has helped peel back that curtain.
I think random generation can work, but Starfield did the absolute minium to qualify. The pool of potential "Points of interest" is very small, and when they do appear they are basically exactly the same. Enemies spawn in the same locations, loot is in the same spot etc.
If you want random generation in games to be useful, it needs far more options to work with, and hopefully some over lap between them to make memorable moments. I always think of MInecraft. The sheer number of Seeds in that game is nuts.
The way terrain is generated often blending between one and another is impressive, then you have resource placement like Ores, various Structures that not only spawn but can be affected by where they spawn. You have villages hanging off the edges of mountains, Mine shafts that are exposed due to a nearby ravine etc.
Simply put Minecraft did it better years ago, and only has improved over the years.
Well, no one is going to make 1000s different animals, plants, buildings... especially not lazy Bethesda. The entire idea of "1000 planets" is dumb. Fallout and Skyrim at least try to hide flaws of both game engine and game design. But in SF both are exposed.
@@bdleo300 Honestly I think the biggest issue is Starfield tried to do too many different things, and did none of them well. if it really wanted to go all out on exploration and randomized planets it could.
But it would need to have a random animal generator, dozens of arms, legs, bodies, attack types/elements etc. And have them put together per planet or something. Something similar for plants, terrain etc.
But even if that did work, there was no reason to really explore. Base building was very weak, and the weight limit of what you can carry so insanely small gathering resources to build something impressive would be nuts.
But yeah 5 or 6 well fleshed out planets would be better than thousands of randomly generated ones for the most part. Because random planet generation would need a reason to go explore, and nothing in Starfield really gives you one.
honestly i feel like procedural generation is being used as an easy scapegoat for people to ignore the larger issues with Starfield and Bethesda in general, procedural generation is a neutral thing to have in a game in can be used well or be used poorly and that's entirely up to the game designer having procedural generation is not a bad thing not doing anything with it is whats bad, Starfield biggest problem is not procedural generation its a pattern of misunderstanding or outright not caring about role playing game design that Bethesda has displayed since 2006, Daggerfall unity has recently become my fav game ever and its full of procedural generation so why isnt it a problem in that game? Because that game is actually a well made rpg with deep mechanics something Bethesda hasn't actually produced since Morrowind in 2002
Good point. I think the world building is just poor in Starfield. Space is a blank slate for the imagination to fill. And they fill it with lots of .. not much at all. It's 300 years in the future, yet other than spaceships, no amazing new tech. No magic - in both senses of the world.
In Morrowind, I spent hours reading the lore in the books. Some of the writing was quality fantasy genere writing. Yet Starfield, the writing is so bland and dull, Chat GPT could do it with more life.
well, the beginning of the video kinda explain what bethesda did with oblivion to render the generation better... a true human was fine tuning the dungeon that were generated. in starfield, they decided to have some templates, and then copy paste the templates everywhere... problem is, they seems to have completely underdone the amount of template.
True but this game having some of the most boring and repetitive generation ever doesn't exactly help. Like they're not even cool to look at...
You're right though. Procedural generation can be really cool. You just need to make sure there's interesting mechanics within the generation that interact with eachother or the player. It's not just a way to make really big maps....
One thing that really bothers me: it is more XP profitable to go to a place and randomly shoot fauna than scanning and studying stuff.
I don’t like to kill random animals, with the exception of the terrormorphs.
In the other hand, I love to scan stuff, a scientist/researcher build should be completely viable. Benefits for finding planet traits and cataloguing all species should be way more rewarding, like actually unlocking unique skills that affect the gameplay.
Even hive mind organisms grow and behave differently depending on the environment. Sometimes size is the obvious factor when one considers the level of a threat, sometimes it isn't in which case there is something about it that makes up for it, such as venom/poison, or even sheer numbers. Even Skyrim's creature placement makes some logical sense. This just looks like a Steam Greenlight shovelware game.
To be fair, I think you definitely could tune and tweak a procedural system to take all these things into account. Kind of be like, why even do it procedurally at that point though.
The same way you can develop a game to do literally anything you want, you just need time and resources. Procedural generation could generate a world similar to ours in complexity and detail, but, it would take an insurmountable amount of time and money to create a generation tool capable of that.
Well, in that case you think wrong.☺
@@marcola4767dwarf fortress simulates atleast 42% of real human behavior when it generates a planet, man. Even hundreds of years of history that has context in those locations. Worth a check out. That guy did it for (basically) free because he loved his game.
I think the biggest letdown with Starfield is that I can't really explore a planet. I get to explore a very small square of terrain, about as big as a city. I can't explore the planet by just wandering around. This is something that should be changed. Even No Man's Sky has actual planets that you can move around on.
Im interested in how quickly modders improve the procedural generation. Without the CK in one month they have done some amazing things. Its just sad that the leadership of BGS is so...complacent.
Add to that their inability to learn from criticism. "You just need to upgrade your computer" "You just need to not pick up every pencil holder and plate" besides every bug fix that modders have made for their games that then shows up in the next game, and the one after that.
The best thing that could happen to BGS would be for all of the leadership positions to be replaced.
All Starfield does is scatter premade hand-crafted assets randomly around the map. I wouldn't even count it as a procgen.
Even the most basic roguelike is expected to generate unique dungeons for you, but Bethesda even struggles to randomize the loot somehow.
Playing starfield just made me want to go back to Skyrim or Fallout 3.
I am lvl 46... I have cleared like 10 times each SAME freaking locations...
This level of laziness...
1000 planetes of everything the same, who cares?
I totally agree with you. There are many problems with Starfield, but I think the core issue with the game is the procedural generated areas instead of normal handcrafted maps. It feels empty and disconnected. And the fact that points of interest just spawn around you wherever you land, it makes it feel so artifical as you know they didn't exist until you landed, and there are not many of them so you end up seeing the same one's over and over.
What I didn't like about the exploration was that they never took advantage of the the other side of it. Yes, it can be beautiful and fascinating, seeing things that you've never seen before and marveling at the colors and phenomena around you. But remember: this is mostly uncharted territory. There should have been actually dangerous storms like lightning that shook the earth, comet storms, giant flaming geysers as the planet releases pressure, desert sands that are soft like oceans and can swallow you whole. Imagine they have a device that can scoop matter from a planet's orbital rings that is dangerously close to breaking down so you're trying to save the crew before the craft is consumed, hearing and feeling the thing slowly break down as the scoop starts losing power and gets trampled by high-speed matter crashing into it... Space can be amazing, but also terrifying. Part of why Constellation has its name should have been because, despite all that could happen, they dare to brave the unknown and find out WHY these things happen. That's what they advertise, but you never really get to take part in that. Such a shame.
Their strength wasn't making it feel "lived in" it was making areas with stuff to do. Relatively compact and interesting. It didn't have to make sense, which would be necessary if you actually wanted it to feel "lived in," it just had to be fun;
I dno, lot of the time you weren't doing anything though. Like most of the time you're not fighting or looting or something. Most of the time in Bethesda games is spent walking around. So it's important to have an interesting world to walk around in. Part of this is having enough npc's and quests to interact with but part of its also making sure the time in between is engaging. Having a believable immersive world helps a lot with that.
"stuff to do" lol it's a Bethesda game. the gameplay is extremely basic. their strength is in world design.
The fact thaT this has less hand made major cities than skyrim should tell you something
Honestly if the handmade part of the game would have been well made, I would have overlooked the shitty procedural generated part. But OH GOD!!! There are so many flaws that I wonna cry. I really wanted to love this, I loved many other GDR from Bethesda, but this is an eyesore
Most people don't fully understand procedural generation, in it's simplest form something like "Simplex Noise" is going to give you the same same output for the same input every time. So for example if you feed a 2 input noise algorithm 2 numbers it will give you the same output every time and if the next numbers you feed it are near the previous numbers than the next output will be very close to the previous output. so lets say you want to make a terrain mesh, you already have all the x,z coordinates all you need to do is generate the y coordinate an you have a height map. And those y coordinates will smoothly transition and create nice rolling terrain based on some other factors like amplitude and some other things. Also, the map will always be the same regardless of when you generate it. So you can "pre bake" your terrain. you can also use higher dimensional noise and make more abstract relationships to things like plant, animal and poi spawn locations. But the point is you are most likely pre baking the world and very little is being procedurally generated (maybe mineral locations) at runtime.
Starflight 1987 Binary Systems/EA, it uses this same concept to create a galaxy to to explore (255 planets for 1987 using a programming language called 4th which was basically Assembly language with some extra math libs. So Starfield isn't really all that revolutionary since this tech was proven long long ago.
So What I think would be interesting is the bulk of the universe gets procedurally generated but, you use AI to help vary the parameters. Then you can use generative ai to fill the universe with stuff and then have human writers and designers go in and hand curate sections of it. Anyway that's my 2 cents.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_noise
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight_2:_Trade_Routes_of_the_Cloud_Nebula
www.gog.com/en/game/starflight_1_2
They made the game world bigger, but it ended up making exploration less satisfying. Instead of spending more time in the game as they expected, I actually spent less time in it. Out of all the BGS RPG games I've played, Starfield is ironically the one I got tired of the fastest.
Its so boring
The procedurally generated stuff is supposed to be grabbing from handcrafted content like bases and mining facilities. And there is some world building in them on slates or computers in the base. They say that after the war the two sides abandoned many bases and research facilities. So now the Spacers or Crimson Fleet can claim those areas and they have. However, the list of content to pull from isn't' enough. You end up getting the same facilities with the same background on many different planets. It also doesn't appear to retain the memory of what was generated in a specific area. I landed in one spot built an outpost and went out exploring. It was cool for bit I scanned everything which was a blast. Then I got stuck on the last Fauna. So I decided to return later. I landed close to same spot but not exactly the same spot and it reshuffled the content. I thought I was close enough to walk to my outpost but it's like you're on a treadmill. You are walking in a direction but not actually moving anywhere.
I like the birds flying in place 10/10 14:37
"Modders will fix it"
You will find books in certain areas, and not in others for a reson, in every other Bethesda game. In starfeild the robot even points it out at the beginning. A united facility all the way out hear. Now that doe sn't make sence at all lmfao.
If they had an index the size of an Encyclopedia 1000s of generated bits and examples random content, it would work a lot better. Having 10 or 20 gets played out quickly and they should’ve seen that coming.
It’s absolutely insane they dropped the ball this hard.
Bethesda been trash for a minute now. You can't drop the ball if you don't even have it to begin with.
Watch the gameplay trailer for star wars outlaws. Near the end when she lifts off the ship and breaks through the clouds. Thats how you hide a loading screen. loading screens arent the problem in starfield. Its how its handled. For example, when you dock a vessel, instead of being teleported into said vessel, you have to leave your seat, and walk to the door. Thats 2 loading screens back to back. They could fix all of this.
Starfield has nearly no Procedural Generation. the only Actual procedural Generation is Planet Layout and POI placement. Meaning POI's are not random, they will ALWAYS look the same, the only difference is Who occupies them.
Just because I am bored I will decide to explain how such an ecosystem COULD work, but I doubt Bethesda put into it:
So the caterpillar is an ambush predator hiding in small burrows in tall patches of grass, it has a thick carapace so that it can tank many bulets with few necessary organs. It uses some form of sense when hiding in the ground to know when something is about to walk near it. It preps some form of venom and leaps out. Its venom immobilizes it and then all surrounding ones gather to eat the immobilized animal. At that moment one of the larger, faster animals takes advantage of the use of the sensor organ being used for finding the best chunck of meat. It runns through the patch, snaching 1-or if it's luck 2- worms.
But it was just procideral genaration.
My favorite part of Minecraft is their space stations. Starships and the Artemis story are pretty cool too.
Your Rimworld footage with wooden building and open flames scared me
Gotta live life on the edge!
The best part of Starfield is seeing their defenders realize they were lied to, manipulated and stolen from. Their time, cash and trust were taken in exchange for Todd Howard's 2nd "top of the line Tesla".
I don't think it's that deep bro
bethesda fans are used to it really
“Lied to, stolen, and manipulated” bro it’s a video game that cost 70 dollars, calm down lol
@@KO-iw3vulotta fucking money on a game you won't like (for those who will not when they buy it)
At the end of the day, Skyrim a 12 year old game, will still be talked about and remembered for its story, gameplay, world, and polished mods for another 12 years.
Meanwhile the only thing starfield has going for it is the eventual mods, and the die hard fans that will battle tooth and nail to label you a Sony pony if you say the games boring.. But even then those losers will soon forget about the game when the next AAA unfinished title releases.
It's not procedural generation at fault, it's too-simple procedural generation. The permissible variations are way too granular; the number of things which can vary at all is orders of magnitude too small. We don't need every rock, tree, and dungeon hand crafted, we just need so many of them we can't spot the repeats.
Think about it for a moment: nature does weathering and growth according to a certain list of rules, but you don't hear complaints about Hall's Canyon looking exactly like The Grand Canyon but scaled down.
Love sprinting forward while breaking my neck looking left
I REALLY wanted to play Starfield, so ibought NO MANS SKY. 😅
Bethesda games seem to have diminishing returns for me. It seems like each new release of theirs goes 3 steps back. They feel simpler and the rpg aspects are kind of there.
I'm a simple Canadian, I hear a YT'ber being Canadian, I sub.
Joking a little, nice video, I love the game somehow even though I've also recently started No Mans Sky; Starfield really lacks the actual space exploration, but same time hopefully this reception from the public will encourage Bethesda to stick to hand-made content.
I really hope in the future Starfield implements more features for Creation Engine like vehicles, like a Moon Buggy, so they can implement working vehicles in Fallout. Even though in the lore Levitation was almost a lost art by the time Oblivion's story occurs, I really hope they bring back Levitation magic for TES VI since they implemented Zero-G navigation, so its pretty much the same functionality, heck also include anti-gravity magic since they are able to have localized/isolated areas of gravity. (you can walk in your ship in space, upside down in relation to a planet, and be able to walk normally)
But that's as big of hopes as hoping humanity will stop waging wars; they can do it, they have done it before, but it doesn't last long either cause they interpret it as a weakness or flaw, or they benefit without changing that status quo. Bethesda's issue has always been: they have an idea, possibly great idea, they implement the first iteration of that idea, then move on leaving it unfinished or incomplete.
That feeling of knowing you won't revisit a game for a long time is a shitty one.
Finishing Starfield, I sat there and thought to myself "Did I just do ANYTHING that I am itching to do all over again?" and there wasn't. I have never felt that way before in a Bethesda game. And it's even more insane when you think about how this game comes with a built in NG+ system, but there is next to no reason to do so.
This game is the embodiment of "Wide as an ocean deep as a puddle"
Nice analysis! It's one of many problems with the game...
Yes, the entire game is a problem.☺
Take this crap along with Fallout 76, and use those resources to make a GOOD game instead, one that we actually want, like Elder Scrolls 6 (without all the toxic woke crap that ruins everything)
Something ive noticed about these latest releases is that usually if they hype hype hype it will die die die
This is a very well done and reasoned video, one of the best I've seen in a long time actually! Great video and I agree with you completely.
In their defence, I too don't really know how I'd tackle a space RPG in the Bethesda format. I mean, a singular zone like their older work would feel too small given the premise of space whilst multiple large zones would have them spread thin therefore resulting in a quality falloff.
In theory, this model they chose (once the systems for generating terrain was completed) should allow them to save most of the development time and maintain a ton of focus on the handmade contend whilst the generated areas serves as nothing more than resource gain or repetitive radiant questing. Essentially this means they could make an environment equal to their previous games. But it isn't even like that, the hand built content still feels minute.
The world system is counter productive to what Bethesda games do well.
This new model of generated planets instead of one singular environment removes perhaps one of the strongest foundations in Bethesda games. The natural exploration and expansion of ones adventure. You could set off from point A to point B and have it explode exponentially into something far larger. This does not happen in starfield as you constantly fast travel to and from. The majority of environments are superficial and soulless - I have no motivation to explore any of those terrains outside of resource gathering which leaves me with the few hand built zones. This new new planet system model of there's does not fit their specialty in their take on the RPG genre. On one hand I do not think devs should be corned into making the same game for eternity but likewise they didn't make it clear enough that it'd venture this far away from their standard. I know allot claim that you'll like this game if you like the Bethesda formula but I disagree with this as I do not believe this is the typical Bethesda formula. It's the quests and that's just about it. It has stripped the players from creating their own fluid pathways and stories as they all venture off in different manners.
i quit after 30 hours, couldn't be arsed anymore, felt like wasting my time... now 2 minutes into the video and seeing the little oblivion snippet takes me right back to the very best days of my gaming historyfull of excitement, immersion, fun and gratefulness. wish i could relive it again.
14:08
I know I'm late as hell but I still wanted to share this. The Bear and Saber Cat should 100% be reversed. I barely remember fighting any bears in Skyrim, pretty much all of them were hiding away in caves far off the road, their aggression was so low they would attack once I'd had gotten way to close, and they would usually go down pretty easily to archery.
The Saber Cats on the other hand may as well have been nightmare spawn from the depths of Oblivion. They always seemed to somehow teleport directly on top of me while I was exploring the wilderness and instantly shred my Dragonborn like they were an old sofa, while also taking almost no damage from any of my attacks. And they always seemed to show up most often when I low level.
The issue with procedural generation is its not new content, its rearranged content. If I have 5 quest templates that i generate 500 quests from, thats just the same 5 quests 100 times each. Players notice this. Generation can help keep things unpredictable (rooms being rearranged so you cant just memroize layouts for example) but it is limited by the amount of content still. Usually this means you need to focus quite heavily on creating content for generation, a good example is another bethesda game, Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall. The entire game is procedurally generated outside of the main quest and a few buildings, the entire development process was creating new stuff to push into their procedural generation algorithm. Starfield meanwhile had a split development, you have these high effort "islands of content" (as you put it) where everything is handcrafted then you have the open procedural areas.
I think this is largely why starfields procedural content feels so bland, the procedural stuff really felt like a second-class-citizen when it came to content, it just doesnt have the variety or the freedom to generate interesting worlds because they didnt focus on this side of the game. You've seen all there is to see 3 hours in, everything is else is just narrative islands like the bases that appear with a special quest. There just isnt the breadth of content needed to make it compelling. Other games can get away with this because of the amount of interactions you have with the world (deforming terrain for example) but all we have here is an extremely late game building system
Also as a nitpick I'd just like the mention procedural generation has nothing to do with AI.
to put it simply, more content and more rules on generation... more dev time, makes for a better procedural experience. You can't just slap a procedural generation demo into an existing game and expect it to improve the experience
Honestly I made it as far as finding Constellation. As soon as they told me what my main mission would be I noped out hard.
Yeah, 5 nerds sitting in library, and no one in the entire galaxy actually explore anything...
I like the procedural design but at the same time I feel like certain things should have fixed on the planets..I ran into the problem where I may have landed on a planet then later got a mission to go find a temple there but the temple never spawned so I was never able to get the power. Certain outposts, structures, and caves should have been fixed locations on planets but allowing the procedural system work for landscaping and natural landmarks and the like. Kinda how like the cities, Neon, New Atlantis and such are fixed. This would have taken a little more development but would have allowed for the types of glitches where the temples wouldn’t spawn…a key part of the game and not being able to complete it. Plus adding in your build area for an outpost to not change and remain fixed once an outpost is installed. I’ve had many of my outposts glitches where I can use the work benches due to an obstruction, I build the tables next to a small platform that was in my outpost but when I went back the procedural function caused the platform to be gone a cluster of rocks were there enveloping my tables. Quite frustrating when you can’t use the functions of the game because they conflict with each other.
They should have cut the number of planets down to the necessary amount, And then added maybe an extra hundred planets. They could have easily taken 50-75 of those planets and given the planet a reason to exist, and then set parameters for the procedure to generate the layout and enemies based on a set list for that planet. And then the final planets they could have left completely empty, apart from maybe some ominous message or artifact left behind by an extinct civilization.
I suspect that they are expecting Modders to fill in the gaps with cool content.
Procedural generation is great for padding. And when you look at most, maybe all, design decisions chosen for Starfield, they chose the one that pads the game time the most while requiring least effort.
Nothing to do with gameplay or the actual game itself, but I feel like the lack of interest for starfield for me and maybe a lot of people is that we "grew up". Oblivion, Skyrim, Fo3, FNV, they all made up my childhood. I spent countless hours immersing myself in these games back then because as a school student, there was plenty of spare time for gaming. With all the responsibilities as an adult now, the realization that "time is money", it's really hard to play large open world games like Starfield anymore. The fact that these explorable locations are procedural, just makes it feel as if the time sank exploring is pretty much meaningless with nothing really to look forward too. Adding more into that "lack of time to play" feeling.
And thanks to the procedial crap the game forgot to spawn in the Temple on a planet in the powers quest. So couldnt finish my hunt for all 24 powers on the first run.
I would rather have a smaller hand crafted open world story driven RPG than a mostly proc gen open world story driven RPG. Hands down.
I think it's pretty clear they had their priorities set wrongly in the very first place which resulted in this mess. This is going to be long, but let me state my opinion/point. If we look at the "ambient world-building" involving NPCs present in the game with actual handcrafted stuff, you can see that they seem to have invested effort on a different subject rather than the usual things you'd see them do on their other games to make places and encounters interesting instead. Keep in mind that I'm not talking about the objects/clutter on locations---which is said to have been designed by one of the most popular modders who made lived-in cluttered player homes in other BGS titles and ended up getting hired by them for this game. I'm talking about the things they specifically crafted with writing and other considerations you mentioned in this video, but involves NPCs in this case. This is going to involve the whole "agenda pushing" thing so bear with me here.
First, the drama thing. The pronoun thing is certainly not that mentioned across the rest of the game, but I think it's being used to cloak the rest of the sheer volume of handcrafted ESG-DEI propaganda injected into the game so that people don't talk about it. For example: The Terrormorph quest decision and NPC reaction to the choice is inflexible because it's supposed to be subliminal messaging for _"Trust the Scoience!"_ It's meant to force the player into accepting and taking it at face value that only accepting the experimental drug/virus is _the right thing to do_ because the so-called *"Experts"* and everybody else around you tells you it is. This game is filled with a lot of that, basically, ESG-DEI stuff.
If you haven't noticed/encountered them yet, majority of the ambient NPC _families_ (meaning parents with children) in this game that have unique mostly-world-building flavor dialogue suspiciously all seem to be of the _alphabet_ variety with two parents of the same sex. I would go so far as to say the only instances of scripted traditional "nuclear families" among NPCs in the environment that I've encountered actually end up being either single-parent households (the spouse is dead), or that one annoying encounter with the "smarter than adult" kid who almost gets taken away from his white parents and nearly gets given to some random adoptive parents by a black woman in a government position.
There's also a multitude of ambient NPC romance encounters that play out in the same "alphabet people" subliminal messaging manner. Usually a biological guy after another biological guy. Or a transformer (as-in somebody who likes to transform their physical selves a lot) who has a romantic partner off-screen, who's entire purpose of existence in the game is to be implied to be constantly surgically changing their appearance in the character creation clinic, basically getting their friend interested in doing the same. Oh, and the whole thing with NPCs who are there just to scream the "We protest because we don't want to move on. We want to be angry! And we want xxxx group of people to be gone/removed!" theme. Because fiery but peaceful protests are acceptable it seems, instead of moving on and living in the present (dialogue-wise).
If you look at the shops, all "service industry" shops end up having white soul-less sounding employees, while the self-employed shops are of the _racial minority_ contrary to that. There are encounters made just to show to you entitled behavior or "Karen" behaviors all of which seem to be centered around light-skinned NPCs. The bourgeois type of shops also often seem to end up being owned by less melanated NPCs. Or high-ranking positions across all industries in the game as well as an obvious percentage of the physical "vocations" being held by strong women, or if the higher position is a man they must always be supported by a woman NPC who is written to be more talented and capable than they are.
This game is chock full of subliminal programming that it's blatant at this point IMO. And if you think about it, they spent all that time, effort, and money, just to put all of these handcrafted useless things into the game instead of actually focusing on better biome design, storytelling and questing. They spent time actually directing, choreographing, dubbing, sound testing, modeling, etc. all of these but could not bother to do so for the actual "biome exploration" part of the game. The priorities are wrong from the very beginning, hence we get this product. IMAGINE if TES6 comes out and it's filled with the same stuffed direction. Welcome to Tamriel California! I guess... And I won't be buying it if so as it feels soulless and empty. 😫
100% Agree. SF = "Minority"/Woke quota-fest, nothing more.
FO4's Atmosphere, the feeling of solitude, the feeling of desolation is streaks ahead of starfield. Initially in Starfield I experienced atmosphere in the abandoned mines/outposts, but the endless repetition of copy paste buildings and NPC's vanished that sentiment quickly, its now a massive boring chore doing these missions in order to build xp.
8:58 holy shit is that Arc de Soleil playing in the background? It's a song called Bocosaurus right?
I think the main reason Starfields earth doesn't have large ruins or buildings is that it would make the game slog or crash. As I noticed that in fallout 4 downtown Boston can cause your game to crash most commonly in heavily populated areas.
Don't call it proc-gen. It is degrace to proc-gen. Call it copy-paste.
It's one thing to use ai to procedurally generate interesting landscapes. You could then use those landscapes and modify them to save some development time. The problem is when devs try to make every experience unique. That only works for a game centered on player creativity and crafting. It doesn't work for other games. I still have no idea why ANYONE plays roguelike games.
Isn't the reason so many people love Bethesda because of the massive handcrafted worlds you can walk around in freely? Clearly the logical thing to do is create a new game with 90% procedural generation and fast travel is also required because Bethesda isn't even *close* to having the tech needed to make a good space game
funny how you mention Rimworld in the end, a large chunk of the beauty of that game is from the absolutely dizzying number of interacting mechanisms within the unassuming 2D graphical presentation.
Starfield - at least from what I've seen come across my feed here - has little to no "under the hood" work done to make the setting *Feel* alive. if anything, I think the brunt of script work is just for the Engine's procedural generation, which can't really work with Creation itself without making a rather butt-clenching number of compromises with the Cell Loading limitations it has.
I like walking on the planets. I also play skyrim to walk around forests. I like walking.
I disagree that procedural generation itself was the problem, I think it can be used to great effect. I do agree what was done in Starfield was not great, the biggest problem was they played it way too safe. They should have mixed set planets with procedural and gone much, much bigger in ideas. Dead planets, hazardous planets, caves with ultra rare minerals, swarms of aliens, more unique stories told instead of an 'abandoned' whatever
Effort requires money and it's clearly not needed if the game sells
So I landed on this barren planet after receiving and following a distress beacon i exited my craft ... and then I walked and I walked and I walked. After a wide expanse of nothing much, I hit an invisible force field. I smacked my face on the inside of my visor and my nose bled.
I suddenly heard laughter. Uncontrollable laughter! I turned, to see an OLD man, laughing from his belly! He laughed so hard that he died and fell to the floor.
I found a diary which explained that this old man arrived on the planet 76 years ago and on discovering the forcefield, his mischievous nature couldn't resist throwing a distress beacon just outside the forcefield. He sat back and waited. For 58 years. With an infinite supply of everlasting sandwiches, all of them with only one bite taken from them. He waited and waited for the hilarious moment of my arrival and the smashing of my face into the forcefield.
At this moment, his life was complete and he left this Universe with a smile on his face.
I felt glad that I had fulfilled this person's dream. As I turned around to walk back to the ship, Sarah Morgan explained thay she was very, very, VERY disappointed in me for contributing towards his death.
I shrugged and carried on with my quest to bring some liver pate to a lady in a clinic reception.
(only some of this story is true... shortly afterwards, I shut down starfield for good because I kept falling asleep in my chair, which makes my neck sore).
Thanks for this video, which exactly explains why Starfield is so dull in many aspects of its gameplay.
When I first heard about starfield, I got so excited. Then I found out you can't land your ship, or fly it in atmosphere. You can't fly around the solar systems, or go from orbit to ground seamlessly, like elite dangerous. but that was ok, this isn't s space sim, it's a space RPG. I'm willing to give up all of that in exchange for the highly detailed, curated planets we'll be getting! Imagine, dozens of mini skyrims! Each world giving you a "world" of content! Then I actually played the game and found out there's only a small handful of cities, and they're all very teeny and EVERYTHING else is randomly generated. Once I found the same exact alien for the third time (in the same system no less) exploration felt like a waste of time. But the best part of bethesda games is... the mods. It'll take a year or two, but we might still get what the game could've been. We'll just have to wait for modders to do it.
God it's been few years since I last touched Rimworld...
Thanks for reminding me, gotta play it again after redownloading the mods
I haven't played Starfield, yet, but its overreliance on procedurally generated content reminds me a bit of Daggerfall. Except for a handful of dungeons tied to the main quest, all of the (literal thousands) of dungeons in that game are procedurally generated. And hooboy does it show. There's a reason why Daggerfall Unity has console commands to teleport you to a quest target.
There's a difference between using procedural generation as part of development, which is then customised by the devs, and using it in-game on the fly. Using it in-game means there can't be a cohesive continuous world because each bit of the world is created separately with no connection to any other bit. It should never have been used the way it has been, but the reason it was is obvious: it allowed Bethesda to have 1000 planets as the headline selling point.
They went for quantity over quality. Enough said. In THE MAIN STORY I visited a completely identical robotics facility to get an artifact.
Exactly, procedural generation needs to have a fun reason for being implemented.
Having a lot of variation in maps makes me excited when I think of something like “Binding of Isaac” because it gives a different experience and difficulty each time.
In a game like Starfield, when they are offering whole new planets, the amount of options they need to build in for the generation are insane.
Instead they just put in barely over the minimum needed for something so huge, then try and say that there are thousands of different planets to explore.
Yea technically there are…but in such huge game, they feel strangely small and boring.
Edit: Also fuck the whole bullet sponge thing, it’s a really unsatisfying part of the game.
Yeah when I ended up on my fourth plant duplicate definitely sketched me
It would be cool if they made a hand crafted planet in a dlc or something
I have no problem with procedural generation, I have a problem with the huge empty game universe. They should have kept it local to 1 solar system or a single planet.
There are a few massively immersion-breaking things in Starfield. (and yet, I still enjoy the game). The things that bug me the most are that every planet with anomalies and Temples also has man-made structures. Most often occupied by spacers, pirates, or Ecliptic. And yet, the only people who know about artifacts & temples are Constellation & Starborn. Really? It should based on the surroundings - old news.
While I enjoy surveying planets, I have to ignore the fact that 100's if not thousands of people were there before me - did no one already do a complete survey?
Constellation tells me that they are the only Explorers left - well, yeah, we've put stuff on every inhabitable and uninhabitable planet in the Galaxy, and people don't consider scavenging to be "Exploration."
- It's annoying, so I try to ignore it, and generally I do.
Also some of the mis use was not tuning it properly, like giving lists of certain biome creatures, and predator prey hierarcies. Not saying you're wrong, but they could of had a better base to work off of if they had tuned things. Also if there was a way for them to tally what you as a player experienced already so it wouldn't generate duplicate storied content would have helped too.
It's so frustrating AAA studios don't take advantage of procedural generation to make maps larger than we've seen before with then a significant hand touch afterward. No need to go straight to planet size. A game map the actual size of the u.s for example would be wild.
AAA studios are the ones that have the man power to genuinely do multiple large cities, and several dozen medium and small settlements.
One good example of PROCEDURAL GENERATION working great is dwarf fortress.